Journal
The slide your sales team skips
There’s a slide in your company deck that explains who you are. Ask your sales team when they last showed it to anyone.
Third meeting of the day. The account manager opens the deck, clicks past the title page and skips slide two. She doesn’t even look at it any more.
Slide two is the positioning. The board signed it off a few years back, and it still describes the company as it was then.
What she says instead is something she’s worked out over dozens of calls. Usually a client story, then one line about what you actually do now. It works. Tomorrow she’ll say it a little differently, and so will everyone else on her team.
Nobody ever decided to drop the positioning. People just stopped using it, and nobody can tell you exactly when.
Ask the people who sell
Salespeople are usually the first to notice when the brand has fallen behind the business. They hear about it every week, mostly as a polite correction from across the table. “Oh, I thought you only did…”
They’re almost never the ones asked to fix it. So they patch it themselves, each in their own words, and that’s where things start to come apart.
The chain
Here’s how it tends to play out if nobody picks it up.
01
The business moves on and the words stay put
You’ve taken on new kinds of work, maybe in new markets too. The way you describe yourselves hasn’t moved with you.
02Break point
Sales starts improvising
Everyone builds their own version of the pitch. Some of them are brilliant, but put two side by side and they don’t match.
03
Marketing and sales tell different stories
A prospect sees the campaign, then hears something else in the first meeting, and spots the gap long before anyone inside does.
04
Every team ends up with its own slides
Each market and each office has its own version, so customers meet a slightly different company depending on who happens to pick up the phone.
05
Price becomes the deciding factor
When people can’t see a clear reason to choose you, they compare whatever’s easy to compare. It shows up in your margins first.
06
The rebrand comes too late
Eventually someone spots it in the numbers and asks for a new brand. Half the company hears “new logo” and sighs.
Catch it at link two
The moment your salespeople start improvising is a useful one. It’s free research, done by the people who spend more time with your customers than anyone else.
Try this. Ask three of your best sellers to record the pitch they really give. Put the transcripts next to slide two and read them side by side. Whatever they’re saying that the slide isn’t, that’s where your new positioning starts.
- The conscious read
- If the people closest to your customers have stopped using your story, it stopped working a while ago.
- The romantic read
- Your next positioning is probably already out there, spread across a dozen slightly different pitches. Someone just has to write it down.
If this sounds familiar